2011 Oscars: Best Picture

The nominations for Best Picture at the 2011 Academy Awards are in. Check out the Time Out mini-reviews of each film and tell us who you think will win.

Black Swan
It’s best to switch off the more sensible side of your mind, along
with any idea that you’re going to experience a documentary-style
portrait of the world of ballet, before encountering Darren
Aronofsky’s Black Swan. It’s a film that really only works if you let
yourself be swirled up, like its main character, in a storm of
hysteria, paranoia and tears: it’s too impulsive and emotional to be
picked apart at the level of logic and too ludicrous to exist in a
world other than its own. It’s huge fun, but only if you’re willing to
swallow its more bonkers excesses. ‘Black Swan’ gives us a harried,
weepy Natalie Portman as Nina, a delicate, overly mothered dancer with
the New York City Ballet who cracks up ten times over when she lands
the dual roles of the White and Black Swans, Odette and Odile, in a
production of Swan Lake. Realism barely gets a look in as Aronofsky
and his team go hell-for-leather in reflecting this young woman’s
fractured mental state – and the ballet’s own story and themes – in
everything from an invasive, swirling photographic style to the
monochrome production.

The fighter
What do we talk about when we talk about Oscar bait? We may fixate on
accuracy in based-on-a-true-story showcases, be wowed over the
physical transformations of actors, and measure the pandering and
positioning of films with these characteristics as contenders. This is
what dominates the conversation when half-hearted, well-intentioned
awards hopefuls start bolting out of the gate en masse like juiced-up
greyhounds. It’s rarely “Why are these films good enough to be
considered ‘the best?’ ” (take that term with a grain of salt the size
of 127 Hours’s boulder), but rather, “Just how far will they go for a
little bald guy?’ ”

It may be unfair to crucify David O. Russell’s The Fighter for every
seasonal sin committed by its peers who also vie for gold and glory.
But the Oscar question is, tellingly, almost the only thought that
reels through your noggin as you sit through this labor of love for
producer-star Mark Wahlberg, who toiled for years to get the story of
boxer “Irish” Micky Ward up on the big screen. It starts to eclipse
more pertinent notions, like whether the movie actually reveals
anything about the world this Palookaville poster boy turned Junior
Welterweight champion was slugging his way through. Or whether his
half brother, Dicky (Bale)—who went from promising amateur pugilist to
professional crackhead and familial millstone around Micky’s neck—is
the film’s social conscience or just one half of a clunky
Cain-and-Abel tale. Or, for that matter, whether the sweet science
offers salvation for working-class stiffs with quick fists, the very
essence of post-Rocky boxing movies. There are really two desperate
wanna-be prizewinners here—and one of them is the film itself.

Inception
Funny things, dreams. Fascinating for the dreamer, but as dull as a
late morning in Slough for anybody else, unless, of course, your guide
is Freud. Or, as it turns out, Christopher Nolan, the 39-year-old
British director of ‘Memento’ and ‘The Dark Knight’, whose solution to
the boredom of other people’s dreams is to collide their woozy,
ever-changing, upside-down and roundabout nature with the thrust of a
fast-paced, men-on-a-mission movie and a startling visual language
that mirrors their strangeness. Better still, the dreams preferred by
Nolan include images of Paris folding in on itself and a trackless
train thundering through a city. The limited, sleepworld excitements
of retaking your A levels ad infinitum or forever missing a flight at
the airport don’t figure here.

Nolan throws a perfect storm of stunts, effects, locations and actors
at one big idea: that it’s possible to pilfer ideas from dreams by a
process called ‘extraction’, which involves hooking yourself up to a
drip, falling asleep and entering the world of the subconscious. The
holy grail of this process is to reverse it, which is ‘inception’, the
planting of a new idea in another’s mind. That’s the trick that
experts Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt),
aided by new recruits Ariadne (Ellen Page) and Eames (Tom Hardy), try
to pull off while hopping from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa. They’re
working for Saito (Ken Watanabe) in pursuit of business magnate Robert
(Cillian Murphy), and their motives vary, from financial to
intellectual. But DiCaprio has another driver: the memory of his wife
Mal (Marion Cottilard) is haunting him and it’s going to take a lot of
psychological spring-cleaning for him to reconnect with that lost world.

The Kids Are Alright
It’s the warm, wise humour of ‘The Kids Are All Right’ that
distinguishes it from the pack, even more so than American writer and
director Lisa Cholodenko’s decision to make a funny, mainstream drama
about a pair of mothers and what happens when their two teenage
children invite their biological father into their comfortable,
progressive lives in sunny, suburban California.

The two mothers in question – or ‘mumses’, as their kids call them –
are Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore). They have been
together for years and have built a model unit of progressive
parenting in their spacious home. Nic is a successful doctor, while
Jules is just as sensitive and loving as a mother but more drifting in
her career and more prone to hippy-student tics in her conversation.
Just as the pair’s elder child, quiet and assured Joni (played by Mia
Wasikowska) is preparing to head off to university, she calls a
medical centre on behalf of her, 15-year-old brother, Laser (Josh
Hutcherson), a sensitive jock who, we assume, is craving a little male
presence in his life.

The King’s Speech
As attention-grabbing plotlines go, it’s hardly a world-beater:
buttoned-down British royal suffers speech impediment and hires
unconventional Aussie quack to conquer his fear of public oratory. So
it’s thanks to the best efforts of writer David Seidler, director Tom
Hooper and, especially, leads Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush that ‘The
King’s Speech’ isn’t just an enlightening period drama, but a very
entertaining, heartfelt and surprisingly funny crowd-pleaser with a
glint of Oscar gold in its eye.

This is a film of small, precise, perfectly judged moments: while the
historical backdrop could easily have made for epic overstatement and
hand-wringing melodrama, Seidler and Hooper’s decision to focus their
attention on the characters and on their relationships and
insecurities, makes ‘The King’s Speech’ feel intimate and wholly
convincing. And in structuring the plot like a sports movie, with
Firth’s George VI as the plucky outsider thrust unwillingly into the
ring and Rush’s Lionel Logue as the maverick coach who talks him up
off the ropes, the filmmakers press all the uplifting emotional
buttons which audiences respond to.

This is, at heart, an actor’s movie, and both Firth and Rush are on
top form. Their scenes together, as Logue breaks the King down, trying
to unearth the scared boy inside the defensive, blustering aristocrat,
are a joy to behold, packed with little moments of pure performance
and sly, unexpected wit.

127 Hours
Danny Boyle is good at taking a grimy subject, flashing it a smile and
stabbing it through the heart with a big, fat, dripping shot of
adrenalin. For ‘Trainspotting’, he countered the lethargy of heroin
with energetic chases through the streets of Edinburgh and the beats
of Underworld on the soundtrack. For ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, he batted
away all sorts of deprivation in favour of a final-scene Bollywood
dance number in a Mumbai train station. When he’s not having fun with
genres (‘28 Days Later’, ‘Sunshine’), he has a knack for telling tales
from the real world – but doing so from countless strange angles and
with endless hurried flights of fancy and imagination. Nothing and no
one stays still for long in a Boyle film.

There’s little more gruesome and extreme than the story of Aron
Ralston, an American outdoors nut who in 2003 went canyoning alone in
Utah without telling anyone where he was going. James Franco plays the
frenetic 27 year old as an experience junkie and sociable loner. He
bombs through the desert on a mountain bike leaving a trail of dust
behind him. He meets girls in the wilderness, makes them laugh and
leaps into underground lakes with them before saying goodbye. He
bounds over gulleys. Then he misses his footing, slips into a canyon
and a boulder follows him down, pinning his arm to the wall just as he
lands on his feet. He’s trapped, and the film’s kineticism turns in on
itself: like Ralston, its energy is stuck in a hole.

The Social Network
Director David Fincher (‘Fight Club’, ‘Zodiac’) and writer Aaron
Sorkin (‘The West Wing’, ‘A Few Good Men’) have made a mischievous,
scaremongering tale about the origins of Facebook that combines the
talky rigour of Sorkin’s writing with the spooky crispness of
Fincher’s imagery.

It launches us headfirst into an intense exchange between two
students, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Erica
(Rooney Mara), sitting in a Harvard bar, opposite each other, nursing
beers. You can hardly call it a conversation. She speaks smartly and
normally; he avoids eye- contact, talks through her, responds
selectively and, when the chat doesn’t go his way, needily asks: ‘Is
this real?’

It’s a brilliant scene: on its own because it says so much about the
filmmakers’ spin on Facebook founder Zuckerberg and the limits of
interaction that his invention seeks to plaster over, and in the
context of the work as a whole because it tells us straightaway that
this is a film about a creeping void between people, whether or not
they’re lovers, enemies, business partners or Facebook friends. It’s a
savvy prologue to a story of how a perfect storm of social inadequacy,
Ivy League exclusivity and computing genius inspired a global phenomenon.

Toy Story 3
The ‘Toy Story’ films are deservedly seen as the gold standard for
computer-generated animation, putting their gorgeously detailed
digital craftsmanship at the service of a pleasingly simple fantasy
set-up, warm, complex characterisation and classically elegant
storytelling. But, like the best children’s stories, they’re also
about something seriously scary: the separation anxiety with which all
kids (and plenty of adults) are familiar and the spectre of its
extreme extrapolation, total abandonment. It doesn’t take a
sociologist to work out why such themes might strike a chord at a time
when family life is so fragile for so many; the ‘Toy Story’ cycle
broaches the subject with an emotional honesty that allows young
viewers to exercise those anxieties in safety – even if it stops short
of the kind of traumatic wallop associated with, say, Bambi’s mum.

This third outing finds the gang – Woody the cowboy (voiced by Tom
Hanks), space ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), cowgirl Jessie (Joan
Cusack), timid dinosaur Rex (Wallace Shawn) and various other dog, pig
and potato-based playthings – facing the reality of their
long-indifferent owner leaving for college. The toys fear indefinite
leave in the attic or – worse – the trash; the middle ground is
relocation to Sunnyside, a day-care centre where, perhaps, they can
serve new owners. All seems well on their arrival – sweet kids,
welcoming new toys – but jeopardy is, of course, around the corner.

True Grit
Watch the 1969 adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel and you’ll see a
puny coup of counterprogramming slipped in among the ’60s
hippie-revisionist Westerns. Never mind the presence of New Hollywood
stalwarts Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall; this was your father’s
horse opera, jury-rigged to net genre godhead John Wayne a
sentimental-favorite Oscar.

So claiming that Joel and Ethan Coen’s update is superior to the
Duke’s starchy star vehicle isn’t high praise; that they’ve restored
Portis’s poetically arch turns of phrase to the dialogue gives it the
edge by default. The triumph is that the duo has hewed close to the
source material while still making an unmistakable Coen brothers
movie. The tongue-twisting banter between teen heroine Mattie Ross
(Steinfeld) and a Texas ranger (Damon) would make both Edwina
McDunnough and Tom Reagan proud; you expect kid-kicking, one-eyed
sumbitch lawman Rooster Cogburn (Bridges, who now owns the role) to
ask “What’s the rumpus?” The directors’ propensity for verbiage and
ironic violence fits the story like a fringed suede glove. Welcome to
the first stoic screwball Western.

Winter’s Bone
You wonder if they’ve even heard of Washington, let alone Barack
Obama, in the back-of-beyond territory in which this bare-knuckled,
grisly mystery unfolds. Debra Granik’s uncomfortable social thriller,
set among the woods and crumbling dwellings of Missouri’s Ozark
Mountains, is an adaptation of a 2006 book by Daniel Woodrall and won
the prize for best American drama at Sundance. Bleak barely does
justice to the world into which Granik fearlessly leads us as we
follow a girl struggling to care for her two younger siblings in the
face of horror piled on horror.

That girl is Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a 17 year old who is
surrogate mother to her little sister and brother. Their mother ‘don’t
talk much’, Ree says, and mostly stays indoors, suffering, we assume,
from depression. Their dad, Jessup, has disappeared, and it’s his
absence that haunts and drives ‘Winter’s Bone’. His family has even
less money than usual – ‘We’re just a little short on cash right now,’
Ree tells a neighbour when asking if their horse can feed with theirs
– and police and bail bonders are sniffing around their land: Jessup
has a court date approaching, and if he jumps bail, which looks
likely, the family will lose their home. Not for the first time, Ree
refuses to buckle under official pressure or threat of harm. ‘I’ll
find him,’ she promises. ‘I said, I’ll find him.’